Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Dhampyr [Interview # 185]

1) While some artists
seem to have a more obvious name, the term “Dhampyr” in my opinion has become
much more than just a moniker under which to create music. It is a collective,
perhaps a cult-like feel to it. I would liken it to perhaps the Grateful Dead
and their following of “Deadheads”, but still somehow find the comparison
unfit. What are your thoughts on “Dhampyr” not being as much of an alias as it
is a movement?

I have no claim on that,
or something else like that. That’s a territory that I’m not too sure of; I
wouldn’t know where to go to plug myself off into, to make some sort of tangy
outrage that is wonderful in its own worth to emerge as anything obvious enough
that maybe it ought not to go away: there’s supposedly a very specific
detachedness in that sort of enterprise.
It’s a sort of stricken mode of humming through smoke – of chanting corrupt
through subtle dirt and clotted loveliness the often self-accusatory music of
generationally invented paranoids, or else, fashionably fucked-up schizoids…it
all sounds like so many lonesome fingernails crossing out the lyrics of the
last guys’ song. But it’s all so terrifically terrible and impolite and
probably necessary at all events so that we don’t dismiss it readily. And maybe
that’s not so wrong. But I don’t know that what I’m doing is so liturgical or
dharmic as to point toward lovely futures or cheapened motel-rooms (on the
house, champagne; on the floor, everything else”), or something otherwise.

It’s a tale of roses caught in the headlights
of a deer. It’s nonsensical. Where does the drunk go after the fifth drink,
impelled by the shuddering beauty of wine and its kingly anointments? Either he
goes for a sixth, or he goes out into the night and the stars dispute his
diadem of tangled hair/kidneys – “You are not king, you grievous bastard.
Praise us. Our virtue is more – and we are dust-motes, after all!”

2) Your music often
comes with contributing musicians and at times they can even be seeming guest
spots by artists behind other projects, Swallowing Bile for example. Do you
have any intentions of collaborating with all of your artists at some point to create an overall
family experience ala The Gathering of the Juggalos?

While those are some
great guys, it wouldn’t work. The Gambino Family worked. The Manson Family
worked. The Jugglers do something, too, I’m sure. Maybe we ought to just vote
ourselves on that bill. If I could learn how to resist arrest like a ballerina
on Benzedrine, I’m sure I could hang out with those guys for a bit. Invariably,
though, like all families, the beer runs out. The wine runs out; the women; the
drugs; God runs out. And you (invariably) twitch down toward 1-95 on a bend,
bending, spitting at cherubic roadkilled heaps and pulling on your last Marlboro
and Love and Death splash pain at you and you click up the off-ramp,
accelerate, wind up, wind down, and wait to just go to sleep.

4) Someone once said
that due to the loud levels both rap music and metal were perhaps best left off
of cassette, but I grew up listening to both on cassette and feel as if they do
justice these days as well when recorded properly. What are your thoughts on
being a heavier sounding act yet on cassette?

Someone said once too
– you couldn’t convince me it wasn’t Nixon – that we ought to put the ‘70s to
trial for five decades. The man lost a few reels of tape and held out forever
against the industry. The “They” and the “Other,” just little dictators tossing
the first confusing pitch. (Invariably) they’re nearly perfectly wrong in every
case; and by the case, too.

5) With your releases,
you seemingly have each one on a different label. (Only one label seems to
really overlap) Do you feel that we’ve reached a point now where artists no
longer need to commit to one label so much as garner more exposure by playing
the role of a musical Johnny Appleseed?

While there’s a new side
of transience to things, I never felt it was altogether not forever unnecessary to follow the small
dictations of one label, or enterprise, or sound…for that reason, too, do I not
record the same record twice – or, I’ll at be decent enough if I do, in fact,
pass off old material as new, to apply some different name. Or else, I just
won’t.

Confessedly, the music on the new record is
largely new still to warrant a special kind of consideration. (And, of course,
the new vocalist on the record – Maxim S. Laurent – has done a significant
number of good things; the lyrics are sensibly off-putting enough, logically or
spiritually, that I was not left altogether stupefied by the job this fellow
did. Though I wrote the lyrics, I shouldn’t guess it was not miraculously
difficult to set them to melody/structure/bar/sensibility.)

6) In the linear notes of “White Fire
Laudanum”, there is the line “Dhampyr does not endorse your existence”. Would
you still say, after all these years, that you do not endorse my existence?

Oh, I wasn’t terribly sure
about that little inscription when I wrote it three ago, when I had just turned
twenty. And I’m even less sure now. That album was recorded under a pose of
pink eyes and palsy and your basic and importantly classical Dionysian
decadence. Or else, your better-to-a-point Aubrey Beardsley Yellow-Pencil #2 décadence jaune .

Certainly there’s a sense
of psychological upset very readily…occasional…on that album. (Shivering.) –
And a real Sartre-y shivering. Nauseated folks gigging up – or giggling up? - to fail to remark on the Holiday, on the
newest quasi-interactive Jersey Boys shooting down/up Broadway…and there’s
always going to be androids somewhere far off – maybe in Oregon; maybe in hurt
Hertfordshire in talks, surely, “Do the electric sheep ever think to dream of us?”

7) Would the title “Withdrawals and Candy
Heavens” be in reference to a candy addiction? Because I’m pretty sure I’m
addicted to gummy bears.

It was hardly specific
enough to puzzle over. That’s all I have to say that I can remember. Allegedly,
a certain inept statesmen-friend of mine (not so much on my ballot, though!) phoned me over a glass
of rotty plum bilgewater to brightly argue that syringes ought to be given out
in sad lieu of harmonicas or candy canes because wouldn’t that just be
something else? It would, Mr. Congressman. It most certainly would, I did so
allegedly reply. And so much, in point of fact. But that might have been
altogether a hallucination or altogether something less decadent. Who cares?
Let’s – all of us together – sing Hallelujah and Heroin and Hanukkah while
chewing over some handsome Hasbro gluten-neutral product.

8) Your newest album is “Oceanclots” and it
has been said to be your best effort yet. There is an old story told by Charles
Bukowski that whenever people asked him what his favorite book he wrote was he
would always say his newest one, which implicated that if your newest isn’t
better than the previous then why write it.

Bukowski mumbled a sad
number on the end of my last major full-length release on War Against Yourself
Recs.

L. Cohen wrote of him
(once) that he (H.C. B.) brought even the angels down to Earth. And that was
just great, I’m fairly sure. I grew up on Bukowski – though I didn’t much
encounter him literarily until maybe sixteen – and he was so gorgeously
dissociated with the Beats, who he (once) went on record so far as to say,
“What’s with all the pouting? The degenerates are always going to be there to
complain about. You, Ginsberg, and you, Jackie K., you’ve just numbed the
process a little more. You’re (now) just whining intropunitively.”

As for the question, maybe
no writer ought to set out to outmake himself more of a spectacle when the
spectacle’s outgrown him; (when) he’s already gone and flimsied the panties of
Greta Garbo – at least imaginarily – forty since prior. You can’t advance past
Garbo, old Hank, but you sure can advance. In age, decrepitude, despond, plain
bad luck; and meanwhile the bottles keep lining up, like chunky piano keys on
the floor. And it all keeps coming on – the sad, the (old, old, old) love, the
noise of old landladies shifting a broken stereo of two apopleptic arms and warring
for rent (“…because the world has failed us both”).

(And) his last two books
were, sincerely, and let’s not be too delicate, a couple cents of gibberish
stamped with a few nickels of some cartoon (and old Henry C. B. went on record
just as well to abolish this self-same cartoon invidiously; for a part of his
life this old crooked hero, this old heroic crooked man, this crook, called
Mickey Mouse a “faggot” once, at a time, and once at a time; but this was a man who spat hymns like
rapid-fire blood clots between juntas of cockroaches and errant housewives, so
perhaps it’s just part of the advantage of having lonely diseases) and what he
got back was Hollywood and glory and preach and slick, sick brawn. Tough for an
alcoholic boy-humorist to start flapping out some disputations at that point as
to how sturdy or subtly non-rehearsed the literary mentation is at that point.

I’m confessedly less agile
to make myself a spectacle. I haven’t any acrobatic mode. Leaking out of bed,
somewhere between August and vomitus,
somewhere between God and Alabraxis and Abraham and Barbiturate, I’ll
flick a broken tooth toward the “TRACKING BEGIN” button on my lousy Boss-BR 600
(which I use more these days) and record a few failures, then fail less on the
fifth or sixth time. Then I’ll take a break and think how I can start failing
better the next dozen times; and so it…goes…

9) Are there any
updates as to what formats “Oceanclots” might be released on? (Cassette would
be ideal for me, obviously)

Sure. So far as I know, Acephale Winter Productions has the tape
rights to the album for however long they want. Good folks over there. They
took me on during my Congressional period and put out “Withdrawals…” Then I
went through them.

10) You also have an
EP with Sylvan Screams Analog. Any more info on that right now?

What I know: Mitch is
a great fellow and only graciously does he take on his recording treatments;
the artists; the whole kith and kin.

11) I also read that
Wolfrune Worxxx plans on releasing your entire catalog on limited cassettes.
Has there been any consideration with that as to doing something like a 20
cassette boxed set of everything to be purchased all at once?

Well, the guy sent me
some mail about re-issuing a good portion of my biblio some good while back;
sadly, it wouldn’t be worth drawing up guesses as to just what he plans,
exactly, to do. What I know: no profits will go to me. What I do not know: if
that isn’t just categorical silliness/self-absenteeism on my part.

12) Final thoughts, shout outs, plugs, etc…
???

Foremost and of
course: this was some delightful chittering.( Àllah vôtre.)

Plugging?

More myself down the
end-wise route of intravenously introducing my Oscar-ponies to the Arterial
Academy.

Anything on the WAY roster
is good: Striborg, Vardan; anything on AWP; Dunnock’s got a great new tape out
on SSA; and in that way, all and any of Mitch’s dream roster. The new album by
Twilight Fauna was so peculiarly sad…have a shot at that one, if you’d
like.

As for what I’m trying to
be doing: Lead Wings will be debuting our first material, featuring the gang
from Atrum Tempestas, somewhere (soon).
(I’ll have a vocal/lyrical role in that project.)

And a friend told me only
a little while ago that he’s got a new project, Tethra, which all of you – “are
you there? Do you care whether we have an ostrich, even?” – ought to at least
enjoy, if not show a total and categorical support. You might know his earlier
stuff in Faded Grave. Good pal of mine, I’m fairly sure.